Pope Francis speaks at the second World Meeting of Popular Movements in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, July 9.

Pope Francis greets a young girl as he participates in the second World Meeting of Popular Movements in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, July 9.

SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia - Meeting with an international gathering
of grassroots activists, Pope Francis not only encouraged,
but tried to add fuel to their fire for "standing up to an
idolatrous (economic) system which excludes, debases and
kills."

Addressing the World Meeting of Popular Movements in Santa
Cruz July 9, Pope Francis acknowledged he did not have a
"recipe" for a perfect economic-social-political system, but
he said the problems with the current system are obvious and
the Gospel contains principles that can help.

The activists - including labor union representatives and
people who organize cooperatives for the poor who make a
meager living recycling trash or farming small plots or
fishing - combat "many forms of exclusion and injustice," the
pope said.

"Yet there is an invisible thread joining every one of those
forms of exclusion," the pope said. They all are the result
of a global economic system that "has imposed the mentality
of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion
or the destruction of nature."

The current global finance system is "intolerable," he said.
"Farmworkers find it intolerable, laborers find it
intolerable, communities find it intolerable, peoples find it
intolerable. The earth itself - our sister, Mother Earth, as
St. Francis would say - also finds it intolerable."

At the meeting, sponsored by the Vatican and organized with
the help of Bolivian President Evo Morales, Pope Francis
shared the sense of urgency shown by participants, who
adopted a long statement of commitments promising to mobilize
in the defense of the rights of the poor and of the Earth.

"Time, my brothers and sisters, seems to be running out; we
are not yet tearing one another apart, but we are tearing
apart our common home," the earth, he said.

"Perhaps the most important" task facing the world today, the
pope said, "is to defend Mother Earth. Our common home is
being pillaged, laid waste and harmed with impunity.
Cowardice in defending it is a grave sin."

"Today, the scientific community realizes what the poor have
long told us: Harm, perhaps irreversible harm, is being done
to the ecosystem," Pope Francis said. "The earth, entire
peoples and individual persons are being brutally punished"
by the effects of pollution, exploitation and climate change.

"And behind all this pain, death and destruction there is the
stench of what Basil of Caesarea called 'the dung of the
devil' - an unfettered pursuit of money," the pope said.

When money becomes a person's god, he said, greed becomes the
chief motivator of what people do, permit or support. In the
end, he said, "it ruins society, it condemns and enslaves men
and women, it destroys human fraternity, it sets people
against one another and, as we clearly see, it even puts at
risk our common home."

In a talk that had harsh words for those who exploit the poor
or destroy the environment, Pope Francis also very formally
spoke to the indigenous people present about the Catholic
Church's cooperation with the Spanish and Portuguese who
settled much of the Americas.

"I say this to you with regret: Many grave sins were
committed against the native peoples of America in the name
of God," the pope said. "Here I wish to be quite clear, as
was St. John Paul II: I humbly ask forgiveness, not only for
the offenses of the church herself, but also for crimes
committed against the native peoples during the so-called
conquest of America."

At the same time, Pope Francis asked the meeting participants
to recognize that many Catholics - priests, nuns and laity -
willingly gave their lives in service to the continent's
peoples.

Most people, including the poor participating in the Santa
Cruz meeting, he said, wonder how they can make a difference
in the face of such huge problems and an economic system that
seems to shrug off any effort at accountability.

The pope urged participants to look to Mary, "a humble girl
from small town lost on the fringes of a great empire, a
homeless mother who turned an animals' stable into a home for
Jesus with just a few swaddling clothes and much tenderness."

The pope and the Catholic Church do not have a program or
"recipe" for solving the problems of injustice and poverty in
the world, he said. But it is clear that the economy should
be "at the service of peoples. Human beings and nature must
not be at the service of money."

"Let us say 'no' to an economy of exclusion and inequality,
where money rules, rather than service. That economy kills.
That economy excludes. That economy destroys Mother Earth,"
he said.

The change the popular movements are working for and the
inspiration for Catholic social justice efforts cannot be an
ideology, he said; it must be about people.

A person with a heart, the pope said, is moved not by cold
statistics, but by "the pain of a suffering humanity, our own
pain, our own flesh."

Pope Francis said the goal must be the creation of "a truly
communitarian economy, one might say an economy of Christian
inspiration." Its hallmarks are respect for human dignity,
guaranteeing a right to land, housing and work, but also
access to education, health care, culture, communications and
recreation.

"It is an economy where human beings, in harmony with nature,
structure the entire system of production and distribution in
such a way that the abilities and needs of each individual
find suitable expression in social life," he said.

Such an economy is not a dream, he said. The people, the
talent and the resources exist.

In working toward a new economy, Pope Francis called the
popular movements "social poets," people who are "creators of
work, builders of housing and producers of food, above all
for people left behind by the world market."

One does not need to be rich or powerful to impact the future
of humanity, he said. The future "is fundamentally in the
hands of peoples and in their ability to organize."

"Keep up your struggle and, please, take great care of Mother
Earth," the pope told the gathering. "I pray for you and with
you."

At the end of his 55-minute speech, Pope Francis made his
customary request that his audience pray for him, but knowing
that many of the meeting participants are not believers, he
asked those who cannot pray to "think well of me and send me
good vibes."